Pages of War: T. S. Eliot and ‘The Waste Land’

T. S. Eliot has often been criticized for his poetry’s inaccessibility to the average person, and “The Waste Land” is no exception. It’s easy to read and think, “this guy is really just showing off how smart he is”–his Latin inserts, obscure Shakespeare and ancient Greek references and highly abstract ideas just seem like a pretentious work of art, which may very well detract from the emotions of the piece. I felt this way the first time I read “The Waste Land.” I had no idea what was going on and no clue as to what separated one section from the next. If you’re an average level reader like me, I would recommend the method I had to adopt for this one (I did the same thing with “Paradise Lost”). Go to either Shmoop (my personal favorite) or SparkNotes and read the chapter or section summary, then turn around and read the book’s same chapter or section yourself. I know, websites like these are blasphemy–but if the alternative is getting lost in language beyond my grasp, I choose to read the notes of those that had studied it first and catch up a little.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Whether you use the help that I needed or you figure it out on your own, you’ll quickly see how the poem relates to war. If you have ever seen “Peaky Blinders” from Netflix, they depict these feelings on screen too: a whole society has been shattered by World War One. It feels as if a great blanket of depression has been laid upon the entirety of human civilization.

The obscure nature of “The Waste Land” could be attributed to T. S. Eliot’s well known style, but it pushes further than that. At times it reflects the shattered psyche of the world, as Britain alone had seen over 700,000 of its own killed. They often enlisted people together, banding young men from home towns in the same unit most likely for ease of documentation and to promote unit cohesion. This led to entire towns of young men getting wiped off the map, groups of boys that grew up together dying all in the same day. Families were devastated, and the British poet Eliot simply said, in his own way, what everyone across the globe was feeling. Where you might get a feeling of combat from Hemingway here and there, or even J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis, you get the civilian side from T. S. Eliot. The weeping mothers and the broken orphans.

Here, we’ll just look at one particular, more straightforward example in “The Waste Land.” At the end of the first part, “The Burial of the Dead,” the speaker is looking at London and calls it an “Unreal City,” describing the London bridge under heavy fog, inhabited by a crowd of zombie-like people. He says, “I had not thought death had undone so many” as the living seemed just as “undone” as the dead.

In this crowd of death, he spots a familiar face–a man named Stetson. He calls out to him, and asks him an odd question: “The corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? / Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?” Like most poetry, the meaning is flexible (to a certain degree). But these passages show how almost everyone is just planting dead things in the ground, hopelessly wishing it would grow into something this time. We plant societies and hope for a better future, then something like World War One comes around and shatters those seeds of hope and positivity–Eliot is suggesting that maybe those seeds were always just corpses to begin with.

You begin to see the profound despair the people of the world were feeling around World War One. “The Waste Land” arguably has kernels of hope at the end, but the purpose of the poem–like many despairing works of art at the time–wasn’t to always cheer people up. It must have been cathartic for readers to have known that even the brightest were feeling the gut punch they just all took. Sometimes you just want to read something that illustrates how you feel, and that’s what a lot of these works did. Articulation goes a long way, even in the obscurity of Eliot’s work.

Featured images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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About the Author

Luke Ryan
Luke Ryan is a SOFREP journalist in Tampa, FL. He is a former Team Leader from 3rd Ranger Battalion, having served four deployments to Afghanistan. He grew up overseas, the son of foreign aid workers, and lived in Pakistan for nine years and Thailand for five.
He has a degree in English Literature and loves to write on his own as well, working on several personal projects.

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Luke Ryan

Thanks for reading! A lot of literature is like this; it's just nice to realize that someone out there feels the same way you do.
That's why rebellious music often appeals to teenagers--they're in the middle of realizing that a lot of the way adults act is this big facade, and how disingenuous that is. Just knowing that there are people out there that share their distaste for the whole facade is pretty cathartic.

Luke Ryan

Haha yes! They helped me a lot when I was studying literature more.
I could sit there and probably figure it out, but for someone like me (not so smart), reading Hamlet is going to take months without help, to really really absorb everything. I'd rather only take a week, and Shmoop allows me to do that.
I still definitely read it! I just read Shmoop first.

Susan B

Thank you, Luke. You certainly made it relevant. Looking forward to part 2. I would have loved to have had access to Shmoop or SparkNotes when I was in school. We had to slog through literature the hard way...and use Cliff Notes when we needed a clue. When it came to James Joyce and Proust, I would have loved to rely on the condensed version. lol

Michelle B

This: "Sometimes you just want to read something that illustrates how you feel."
I think that's what sucked me in about modern military-war writing in the first place, the struggle to find adequate words to articulate the complexity and chaos on the inside while surrounded by a culture fixated on fleeting entertainment and the accumulation of shiny new things.
"We read to know that we are not alone." ~Shadowlands
Thank you for these articles.